AN EVALUATION OF THE SUBFRAME PARALLEL APPROACH FOR IMAGE CLUSTERING

This paper describes a high-speed:parallel clustering method that is s uitable for use as a preprocessor for motion picture compression and c oding. In the parallel clustering process, plural pixels are sampled i n one frame of an image. Clusters are gathered according to their char acteristics, among them, colors, motion vectors, etc., as a way to org anize clusters or modify cluster-parameters in parallel. This operatio n is repeated until the frame is segmented optimally by a set of clust ers. We propose the subframe parallel approach in order to enhance the parallelism of the clustering method and avoid load-imbalance in para llel tasks. The effectiveness of this approach is also presented and i t is shown that a real-time clustering of motion picture images is ava ilable in most cases.